Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

A new kind of Spam

(In this post I quote attempted posts to the blog.
I transcribe them as they are, so if you see a missing period
or awkward language, its not me (this time) its them.)

We moderate comments but do so very lightly.
There is no hard and fast rules but roughly speaking
we block comments that are BOTH offensive AND off-topic.
There may be exceptions- like if its on topic but REALLY REALLY offensive
and adds nothing to the discussion.
There may more benign exceptions- like if I post a question and will block the
answers so that when I reveal the answer the next day its more dramatic.
Of if someone posts information that is not public yet.
In these case we hope they try to post non-anonymously so we can email them
and tell them why they were blocked. There are other isolated cases as well.
All of these are very rare.

Hi there STOC 2012- workshop and honors talks Loved every second! Great views on that!
That actually breaks the mold! Great thinking!

This comment is NEITHER offensive NOR off-topic.Its a bit odd- I can't tell if
the Great view is of my post or of the talks I was writing about.
It does sound awkward. Why is that? IT WAS GENERATED BY A SPAMBOT!!!
How do I know this? Because if you click on the author you are directed to a site thatsells you paints for your living room.Hence we block such posts.

So, they think the readers of our blog are into interior decorating.
I am sure that some are, I don't think our readers are a particularly good market for this. Technology is good enough to find our blogs and try to use spambots on them,but not good enough (or there is no incentive) to figure out which blogs are worthtargeting.This is part of a bigger problem I blogged aboutherewhere I noted that technology is good enough to know that I am a book review editor for SIGACT NEWS but notgood enough (or there is no incentive) to figure out that I only review comp sci and math books, and not
books on (say) politics.

Anon 8:34: Good catch! Yes `Oh well' is borrowed (stolen?) from Godel Last Letter blog (I think its a Lipton-thing, but Ken may be using it oo).

David Kofoed Wind- AH, good point- our data is only one-sided, the ones that fail. I've heard it said that criminology should be called Theory of Incompetence since we only study those that are caught (to some extent)

I also get this kind of spam. Here is one message that was not filtered by Akismet today:

This is so interesting. I felt inspired by reading it!I think this place will become my most talked about site!

I always delete this kind of comment. All comments, that are off-topic or comments that don't seem to add something to the topic (thanks-comments) get deleted. I don't want my readers to waste their time.

Nice to have a blog about computational complexity. I started mine today, but I guess its subject is a bit too broad. My first post deals with comments and shows a trick how to avoid moderators of newspaper websites. Enjoy! https://exwaan.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/the-google-symbol-and-when-to-use-it/